K8 Hardy has been organizing performances (Beautiful Radiating Energy, 2004, NewReport (with Wynne Greenwood), 2006, Bare Life (with Stefan Tcherepnin), 2008),circulating publications (fashionfashion, LTTR), and rethinking this gallery and its uses(WOM_NHOUSE, 2004) from the start. Reena Spaulings now presents To All the G#%$!I’ve Loved Before, Hardy’s first solo exhibition in New York.A new series of photographic self-portraits displays the artist as a rampant multiplicity ofidentities, as an ongoing series of posed or proposed selves. Playing on the codes of bothqueer and hetero-normative cultures, Hardy tests and wastes them all as she feeds herpose machine with other looks and meanings. Sometimes using her sister Halie as astand-in self, Hardy displaces subjectivity across a sequence of gay cruising clichés andcamp possibilities, refusing to settle into any final or agreed upon condition. Shesometimes adds layers of artifice in the darkroom, throwing a bra or a middle fingerunder the enlarger before exposing the print. These photograms both embellish and blankout her image.In the center of the gallery, Hardy has installed a “stage”. We are not sure if or how itwill be used. A wooden “trough” has been stocked with an earlier (2008) series of selfportraits.The artist populates the exhibition with styled and altered mannequin heads,ideal viewers of the Hardy image.Known for her activism within the new feminist, gay and transgender movements, Hardybrings a punk sensibility to these causes and contexts. In politics as in art, the enemies areself-righteousness, conformism, comfort, complacency and barren professionalism.Subjectivities want to explode, and Hardy is our model monster. The self-portrait is anopportunity for chaos, a chance at the self-destroying commodity. Hardy’s worksometimes recalls Cindy Sherman’s “film stills,” but there is nothing still here, alwaystrans...a feeling closer to Leigh Bowery. Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, bla bla blaK8 Hardy hails from Texas. She studied at the Whitney Independent Study Program andin the Bard College M.F.A. program. She is co-editor (with Ginger Brooks Takahashi,Ulrike Müller and Emily Roysdon) of LTTR. Works in collaboration with WynneGreenwood are currently on view at the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Shehas also exhibited at the Tate Modern.